The official website for the renowned writer, poet, playwright and activist.

Wounded in the House of a Friend

Renowned African-American poet Sonia Sanchez explores the pain, self-doubt, and anger that emerge in women’s lives: an unfaithful life partner, a brutal rape, the murder of a woman by her granddaughter, the ravages of drugs. Sanchez transforms the unspoken and sometimes violent betrayals of our lives into a liberating vision of connection in emotional redemption, compassion, and self-fulfillment.

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Praise

“[Sanchez] looks deeply into that most dangerous of places-the heart.”
-Quarterly Black Review

“Sanchez’s haiku is as simple and clear as breathing, but with everything that brings energy and vivacity to being alive.”
-Rain Taxi Review of Books

“Her songs of destruction and loss scrape the heart; her praise songs thunder and revitalize. We need these songs for our journey together into the next century.”
-Joy Harjo

“The poetry of Sonia Sanchez is full of power and yet always clean and uncluttered. It makes you wish you had thought those thoughts, felt those emotions and, above all, expressed them so effortlessly and so well.”
-Chinua Achebe

“Only a poet with an innocent heart can exorcise so much pain with so much beauty.”
-Isabel Allende

“This world is a better place because of Sonia Sanchez: more livable, more laughable, more manageable. I wish millions of people knew that some of the joy in their lives comes from the fact that Sonia Sanchez is writing poetry.”… More-Maya Angelou

“Sonia Sanchez is a lion in literature’s forest. When she writes she roars, and when she sleeps other creatures walk gingerly.”
-Maya Angelou

“In all her words, Sanchez grabs your heart.”
-Vibe

“With an unblinking and critical poet’s eye, Sonia Sanchez has been setting her readers straight, telling the ‘terrible beauty,’ and reflecting images in ways that simultaneously solicit tears and laughter. For over thirty years this revolutionary poet has been undeterred… More-Juanita Johnson-Bailey, Ms.